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No fear. No rules. No equal. Meet the masters: An ex Navy SEAL whose temper is dynamite.An undercover expert who is always dressed to kill. A demolition ace who has a talent for destruction. These are the Shadow Warriors, the leaders of a special operations unit spear-headed by Mike McBride (Hulk Hogan – Suburban Commando). They are a crack team who do shit your average GI Joe has zero percentage chance of coming home from. Only their next mission is off the books. It’s personal. With a bit of business mixed in…and one dudes retirement plan too.

Despite the misleading title, the Oscar win, and all that soppy, emotional marketing, you’d probably be surprised to learn that The Shape of Water is actually a heist movie. It’s sees a motley crew of would-be thieves assembled to steal an unusual amphibious man held hostage in a secret 60’s Cold War lab. Can a mute cleaner, a Russian spy and a gay artist prevail against the might of the American government? Well you’ll have to read on.

Yeah, yeah, I know this isn’t a movie and that it wasn’t technically released in the cinemas or on any kind of physical media. But Netflix’s 2017 animated series, based on the classic ye-olde Nintendo games, is pretty much a singular film chopped up into four 25 minute easily digestible chunks. You’re gonna watch them all at once. So sit down, strap in, and get ready to find out about some dude called Trevor trying to kill some other dude called Dracula.

Gonna make an admission here folks – I’ve never seen the original Magnificent Seven. So while I spend a couple of years reclaiming my lost movie badass credentials, I can at least watch the remake and give you an honest, fresh opinion. Look at it this way; I’ve got no preconceived notions. No expectations. I’m not gonna run into it thinking it’s gonna be shit or that it’s an unholy blight on the original movie and all involved should be struck down by Almighty Zeus himself. I’m just gonna shoot straight and tell it like it is, like Clint Eastwood would do. Note: Clint Eastwood is not in this movie.

Back when I was a kid I had a mate called Peter and we used to spend hours drawing what we called “futuristic war machines”; basically cars laden with spikes, turbo boosters and machine guns. Years later, Paul WS Anderson (Mortal Kombat) would turn this into a movie starring Jason Statham (Hummingbird). And if I’m honest I kinda liked it.

We are obsessed with maxims of human ability; who is fastest, who is strongest, who is deadliest. And we’ve created proving grounds for each. The Olympics. Worlds Strongest Man. That program with Sean Bean’s brother from Lord of the Rings. Etc. But we don’t care about any of that. Truly, the only thing any boy or girl ever wants to be is the biggest action hero of all time. Undoubtedly it’s always gonna be Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. You can argue about who fills that bronze spot on the medal podium all you want (the Lundgrens, the Eastwoods, the Seagals), but gold and silver is a done deal. So then the only real question is who would win between these do monoliths of violence. Lets find out.

Eight years removed from his 1980’s body-transforming, Oscar-winning stint as elite boxer-turned-washed-up-fatguy, Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull, Robert De Niro was fancying something a bit different. Coming off his turn as history’s most famous gangster Al Capone in The Untouchables, he might have been thinking he’d peaked at playing gangsters. With his second wave of mobster success (Goodfellas, Casino) still years away, you can forgive him for wanting to do something a bit lighter. Something that wouldn’t tax him physically and mentally. Something about a bounty hunter…